Notebook

Couper Moorhead

The Miami HEAT are 28-23, No. 6 in the Eastern Conference with a Net Rating of +0.0, No. 19 in the league. They’re up to No. 5 in Defensive Rating and No. 27 in Offensive Rating. Here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.

We have espoused this theory multiple times already in print, but we’re going to do it again because at its very core, this HEAT season is a season built upon theory. No, Erik Spoelstra and his staff did not make changes to the offense knowing it would be a bottom five attack come January. They made changes to the offense because the team struggled mightily to score against Boston in the Eastern Conference Finals. They made changes to the offense because the offense needed changing. The theory, then, and the hope is that the changes will pay out come the postseason.

There are reasons to be encouraged, even if they must be put somewhat mildly given that the team is No. 27 in Offensive Rating and has the lowest rated half-court offense among all teams in the playoff picture. Chief among those reasons being that there are fewer obvious coverages teams can use to jam Miami up.

Last year when teams blitzed Tyler Herro, Miami was getting less than 0.85 points per direction action. Of the 14 times Herro was blitzed in the playoffs, the HEAT got zero points out of it. It didn’t happen as often as it felt, but that’s quite a few empty possessions if teams, like Philadelphia, pick-and-choose their moments to save it for high-leverage spots. Herro has actually been blitzed less this season despite the team coming into it expecting to see that coverage more often, but across 29 instances of Herro seeing two on the ball like that Miami is now getting 1.00 points-per-action. Maybe not an elite number, but certainly much more normal. When Boston tried it in a big moment the other night, Herro got the ball where it needed to go.

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Notebook 42: Boston Blitz Herro

“We hope that the work they put in, the intentional work, will pay dividends,” Erik Spoelstra said. “That’s why we started to develop this because these were the schemes we were facing. To be able to conquer the playoffs, you have to eliminate what teams are trying to get you to do. Clearly that was a gameplan with Tyler, to take the ball out of his hands, to trap him and blitz him on pick-and-rolls. He’s gotten considerably better, right now it’s his best coverage. Who would’ve thunk it a year ago?”

Same deal with Bam Adebayo. Two seasons ago against the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round, Miami scored just 0.81 points-per-paction on Adebayo screens against the drop coverage that was the norm with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez on the court. Across both regular season and postseason last year, that number was 0.92. This year it’s 1.05. Again not an elite number, but a very normal one – normal enough to support a great defensive unit on the other end.

“Then Bam playing out of that drop,” Spoelstra said. “How many times have we faced that in the playoffs? He’s dramatically improved that part of his game.”

The team has reached a point where they can get Adebayo in position – via pocket pass or in a face-up spot – to get to his comfort zone at any point in the game. Nobody in the league has taken more jumpers in the upper painted area. It’s at 48 percent shot, not one that is going to produce highly-efficient offense over 82 games, but it’s a shot they can get to down the stretch of big games. If it’s a tie game with under a minute to play against a great defense in the playoffs, a 48 percent shot is more than good enough.

“I can get to that shot,” Adebayo says. “The only way is if you literally put two dudes in front of me, and at that point whoever is next to me is going to get the ball because it’s not like I don’t see my teammates.”

Speaking still to the playoffs, let’s agree for a moment that clutch minutes – games where the score differential is no greater than five points in the final five minutes – are the best regular season representation of slower, possession-focused postseason basketball. Here is how Miami has scored in clutch minutes, per 100 possessions, over the past four seasons:

2019-20: 102.2 (Rank 23)2020-21: 95.3 (Rank 30)2021-22: 101.1 (Rank 24)2022-23: 110.2 (Rank 13)

We’re always dealing with small samples here (145 clutch minutes this season, however, most in the league) so everything gets salted, but that’s not a bad mark considering the HEAT are only shooting 30 percent from three in those minutes. In previous years Miami’s clutch offense often boiled down to whether or not threes went in or if Jimmy Butler could get to the free-throw line. As Adebayo and Herro develop as shot creators alongside a reliable postseason performer – and matchup hunter – in Butler, there’s both more consistency and diversity to the late-game package.

“For me, I shoot the ball a lot more,” Adebayo said of clutch minutes. “But for the team we got a couple of plays where we know, if we have a couple of plays that go sideways in the fourth, we got these were we can get ourselves in our spots and get something good.”

In other words, they have hard, concrete actions they can rely on when things get tight. If things are always tight in the playoffs, then, it stands to reason that they have hard, concrete actions they can rely on in the 16-game season, too. Teams are going to try to take those away – we’re seeing it already with the attention Adebayo and even the potential passing avenues in his direction are being swarmed in the paint and with Butler drawing doubles in the post – but now we’re into the counters to the counter. Before, the HEAT were often stuck trying to peel the first layer of the onion.

The question now is whether or not the HEAT’s best players can do what they do well enough against great teams and great players in a close series. So much of this is new and new is always a risk. But new was also necessary to try and get to something more, lest the team stunt the development of their promising young talent. Can Herro and Adebayo be good enough with their increased responsibilities, can they be efficient enough to win four games in a series against a team that might be able to match Miami defensively and is able to get to their own actions with elite offensive talent?

Miami’s offense is not good right now. It’s neither efficient nor is it particularly enjoyable to watch. They certainly don’t care about the latter part, and the context for the former changes in a seven-game series. Until that time comes, it’s all theory and conjecture. And hey, if the team was shooting even league-average from three, they would have a Top 10 offense and much of this would be entirely moot.

What’s happening under the hood may be more mechanically sound than the rough paint job makes it look, but the engine won’t be pushed to its limits until April.

This team just keeps racking up the steals and turnovers. With 16 steals against New Orleans last Sunday, the HEAT now have two games with as many steals this year which ties them for second-most for the franchise in a season. Since Victor Oladipo’s return they’re forcing turnovers at a rate that would effectively be the third highest in a decade. If this team has anything they do better, more consistently, than anything else night-to-night, it’s turn the other side over.

How they do it is well-trod territory. Against a team like New Orleans, missing high-usage playmakers in Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson, Erik Spoelstra can lock in on the one player driving most of the offense and find a way to make his life miserable. Out of the nine times Miami blitzed CJ McCollum that day, the Pelicans only got 0.14 points-per-pick out of it. Out of the five times Miami showed – still putting two on the ball for a beat or two while giving the screener defender a chance to recover and avoid a switch – the Pelicans didn’t score at all. McCollum shot 5-of-16.

“[McCollum] was the point of attack on basically everything they were doing,” Spoelstra said. “That’s number one. Number two, I just liked out activity way better. We seemed to be a little more passive at the start of the game when we were playing our normal coverages. Which have been very good for us, so it just kind of depends on the game. But the last four minutes of the second quarter we were basically trapping everything, we were flying around, so we said, ‘Ok, let’s do more of that.’

McCollum’s seven turnovers were also one off his career high.

“They just threw a number of looks at him,” Pelicans coach Willie Green said. “They tried to deny the ball out of his hands. When he came off DHO’s or pick-and-rolls they tried to blitz him. We all have to do a better job of recognizing what’s going on on the floor and running our offense and dissecting what teams are doing. I thought the turnovers was a direct example of their defense being up, being active, getting deflections.”

Being up is the operative term there. Even as the HEAT have gone towards more conservative coverages at times, running drop coverage and tons of zone, they always find a way to be anything but passive. Spoelstra has used the words “multiple efforts” so many times over the years that it’s barely more noticeable than him using the words “game” or “win”. But they are meaningful words, and on New Orleans’ best opportunity in the final minute it was multiple efforts which changed the play from what might have been a dunk to a tipped pass and turnover.

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Notebook 42: Pelicans Extra Effort Turnover

As Herro switches Butler decides to ignore Dyson Daniels and go for the double. Herro could have just held the double, but as McCollum quickly moves to get off the ball Herro – he may not be shutting down guys on an island but his activity has seen a marked and noted improvement this season – flees the scene to recover to Daniels. Adebayo goes freelance at this point to create another double, which makes Daniels stutter on a possible look to the corner. In a lot of ways, Miami is beaten at that point. Larry Nance Jr. is right at the cup and he’s a rather simple pass away from putting his team in front. Adebayo and Herro do their best to make that simple pass more complicated, and the extra effort disrupts the passing lane just enough to make both delivery and reception just a little bit tougher.

We talk plenty about how the HEAT’s entire defensive scheme has been constructed to make turnovers possible – crowding the ball at opportune times and creating deceivingly tight passing windows – and how it puts its defensive playmakers in position to play off their instincts. That’s all true. You don’t get anywhere without the effort that is hardly to quantify with great accuracy but is in many ways quantified in every number we use.

“Your scheme isn’t going to get anything done,” Spoelstra said after beating Boston a couple days later. “It’s the efforts the discipline, the multiple efforts that you have to make.”

Speaking of that Boston game, since the Celtics were missing just about half their rotation it was another great example of how the HEAT can lock in on making life difficult for a single offensive engine – and how the scheme can enable the effort which then powers the scheme.

Haywood Highsmith garnered plenty of attention after that game, rightfully so, for the pressure defense he applied to Jayson Tatum, defense which Spoelstra called the “inspiration” for Miami’s fourth-quarter comeback after falling behind by double digits. But take a look at this image of Highsmith getting right up into Tatum’s body down the stretch.

If we went back and rewatched Miami’s first-round series against Atlanta last season we would be able to grab dozens of screenshots just like that one when Trae Young tried to attack a matchup. Pressure on the ball against a deep threat you have to respect, flankers on either side of the pressure ready to shrink the gaps if the on-ball defender gives up a step. So when Tatum tries to drive and the flankers pinch in, it

Somewhat ironically, a couple of minutes later Tatum beats Adebayo, who rarely gets beat, in a very similar situation specifically because the team tends to bring less immediate help when one of the best defenders in the league is on an island. Soon after that, with Gabe Vincent pressuring, a Herro pinch gets Tatum to pick up the ball on his drive which then allows Adebayo to stay back and get a hand on the lob.

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Notebook 42: Bam Tip Tatum Lob

Spoelstra didn’t take any risks on the last possession, up two with under ten seconds to play. The call there was a hard double, that pressure forcing Tatum to attempt a skip pass to the corner off his heels. Herro spaces the two on the weakside perfectly, snatching the reduced velocity pass out of the air, and that was that. A scheme that calls for pressure must also enable that pressure, and when the opponent doesn’t have high-level options to drive the gaps created by that attention being devoted to the ball, mistakes are made as playmakers get sped up. Like McCollum the game before, Tatum finished with seven turnovers.

-The HEAT have worked themselves back into a Top 5 spot on defense, which is pretty remarkable if you consider where the season started. Joining them are Milwaukee, Memphis, Cleveland and Boston. Now, Miami is having one of the best turnover-forcing seasons for any team in recent memory, but if you take out defensive possessions ending in turnovers and focus only on shots and fouls, their defensive ranking drops all the way to No. 16 (No. 28 in half-court man-to-man coverage). You do the same for those other four teams, Milwaukee, Memphis, Cleveland and Boston, and they all stay in the Top 5. We’ve repeated variations of this stat a few times already, but if we’re going to spend much of the season discussing how the offense might be better than it looks it’s only fair to point out some of the weirdness on the defensive end. The HEAT have proven themselves to be capable of turning other teams over in the postseason, especially against Boston, so they should be able to sustain what has become their identity. They just might be a little more dependent on inducing mistakes than they were a year ago when they could more reliably flatten teams out with switching.

-Miami has now played a league-high 26 games (second place is 21) decided by five points or less. The league record post-ABA merger in 1976 is 41, and the high since 2000 is 37 set by the 2001-02 Houston Rockets.

-The Charlotte Hornets on Sunday became the sixth team this season to post an Offensive Rating of at least 119 while turning the ball over on at least 19 percent of their possessions.

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Coup's Notebook Vol. 42: The Offensive Theory Of Everything, Taking Players Out, Turning Up Turnovers And Pinching The Pressure

The Miami HEAT are 19-18, No. 7 in the Eastern Conference with a Net Rating of -0.8, No. 19 in the league. They are No. 8 on Defense, No. 24 on Offense, and have played 25 clutch games, more than anyone else. Here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.

Over the past two seasons, only the Toronto Raptors have forced more turnovers than the HEAT, with Miami also ranked No. 2 in opponent turnover percentage this season. Because of that, they’ve clawed their way back up to No. 8 in Defensive Rating despite being No. 22 in half-court man-to-man as tracked by Second Spectrum. In other words, the HEAT’s ability to force turnovers – which has the side effect of giving Miami more shots on goal – has been a major driving force for their ability to hang around the middle of the pack in the Eastern Conference while their offense finds its way.

We could just leave it at that, which is often as far as it goes when talking about turnovers, but it’s worth digging in even further for something so critical to Miami’s success. How do we better show the importance of a very particular section of defensive aptitude?

Let’s try this. First, we’ll look at the half-court coverage, which is ranked No. 8 by Second Spectrum allowing 1.10 points per possession. Now, obviously we know that a turnover, by the very definition, is going to produce 0.00 ppp because it marks the end of a possession. You lose the ball, you don’t get any points.

What about all the other plays? You can’t steal the ball every time down the court no matter how good you are at it. Well, if you take out turnovers and focus strictly on half-court possessions that end in a field-goal attempt or foul – the only other ways a possession can end – then every team in the league is going to see their defensive efficiency balloon. Miami’s, for example, jumps up to 1.30 ppp, but even the top mark, Milwaukee, is 1.21. Remove the best possible result for a defense, of course the numbers aren’t going to look as good.

It’s not the number, then, it’s the ranking. Without turnovers, Miami’s half-court defense falls down to No. 24 in the league. It’s an even steeper drop with the Raptors, going all the way from No. 10 to No. 27.

You might be wondering if the same thing happened last year, when the HEAT were No. 3 in opponent turnover rate, and the answer is only barely. Miami was No. 4 in half-court defense overall that season, and they only dropped to No. 8 when removing turnovers.

There are a few theories we could try out with this, some that would require watching more film to get real answers for. For one, teams are currently shooting 36.9 percent from three against the HEAT, third highest in the league. That’s not as bad as it seems, though, as they’re closer to the seventh-lowest percentage allowed than the highest. Miami was switching more often last year, forcing more isolations and keeping the ball in front of them. That may change the type of turnovers being forced, and in that line of thinking the HEAT are forcing about one more steal – a live-ball turnover – per game than last year. In that sense, Miami may be chasing more boom-or-bust turnovers, that sort that you can quickly turn into points to juice your offense but also the type that can cost you if you miss a pass. Different coverages, more drop in pick-and-roll and more zone, means teams just have more space to play with and thus more recourse to get a decent shot up when they don’t give up the ball.

But wait, if you look back at the Boston series, the same effect is there again. Miami held the Celtics to 1.09 points per half-court possession in that seven-game set, which would have been a Top 10 mark during the regular season. Without turnovers, their number drops to 1.29, which also would have been No. 25 over 82 games. And there was plenty of switching in that series.

In the end, the why or how might not be as important here. The what is that turnovers are hugely important to this iteration of the HEAT. If you’re following along with a game at home, that column might be the first one you want to check in a box-score.

THE FEET-FIRST COVERAGE OF NIKOLA JOKICThis one is just funny. I’m not the first to notice the two-time MVP doing this nor will I be the last, but in the context of Miami’s pick-and-roll game – as prominent this season within their repertoire as it has been in four years – and how often they’ve relied on slipping pocket passes to Bam Adebayo against drop coverage, it had me chuckling watching Jokic keep kicking out his feet to get in the way.

These are just the instances that I caught live:

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Notebook 38: Jokic Kicks Out

Jokic is infamous for ranking highly in many of the advanced defensive metrics despite being neither a shotblocker nor a particularly agile perimeter defender. What he is, however, is very smart with great hands – he disrupted Adebayo’s rhythm in the paint on multiple occasions Friday night – and, seemingly, kung-fu feet.

With so many moving pieces in Miami’s rotation this season, and on their injury report, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to see how the HEAT change their offensive approach when they’re missing their primary engines in Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler. And the gist of it is, basically, take more threes. Which is only logical. Butler and Adebayo are Miami’s most consistent sources of toward-the-rim offense, and when you take one of them out of the equation the best way to compensate is to play the variance game and pump up the threes.

Kyle Lowry has been pretty outspoken about this effect ever since last December, when the HEAT survived the month without Adebayo by shooting 40 percent from three on 38 attempts per game. In that season, Miami attempted about 35 threes per 100 possessions (on 37 percent shooting) when both Adebayo and Butler played in the game, and 44 threes per 100 when neither of them played (over 768 minutes) – shooting better than 41 percent.

The same has been true this season. When both Adebayo and Butler play, per pbpstats.com, the HEAT attempt 35 threes per 100 possessions. In the two games when neither of them were available, Miami took 45 threes per 100. And when just one of them couldn’t go, the attempt rate has been 39 per 100.

The difference has been the conversion rate. When either one of Miami’s two All-Stars was not in uniform last year, the team still had an Offensive Rating over 113 thanks to above-average to out-of-this-world shooting. This year that number has dropped to 110.3. Even when both have been able to play, if one of them was off the court resting last year Miami’s Offensive Rating approached 120. This year? Just 110.8. Much of that is the drop in shooting, but we should also consider that teams are now just as familiar with how the HEAT try to give themselves a little boost.

“When we have guys out, it’s just by any means necessary,” Spoelstra said. “When other teams know that we’re just kind of tapping into one specific part of the menu, it becomes easier to defend.”

Spoelstra generally never talks about this without also mentioning how important is it to maintain a balance between threes and paint touches, and over the past few weeks that balance has what has encouraged him about the offense moving forward despite the team’s offensive rating sitting No. 29 in December.

If it seems like Gabe Vincent is pretty good in the paint, especially around shotblockers, it’s because he is. Over the past two seasons, Vincent, listed at 6-foot-2, is shooting just a tick over 50 percent on 115 shots in the 3-to-10-foot zone. While he’s often tracked as a shooting guard by the cameras because of the lineups he plays in and players he defends, Vincent is certainly sized like a point guard and among other players logged as point guards by Second Spectrum that 50 percent mark would be good for No. 8 among qualified players. Kyrie Irving leads that particular group at 59 percent from 3-to-10 feet.

In his return to action this week against Minnesota, Vincent was more than happy to Pac-man up the space afforded to him by Gobert dropping deep back to the rim. He didn’t make every shot, but a little paint-attacking burst in the fourth quarter stretched out Miami’s lead just enough to help them hold the Wolves off in what became yet another clutch game.

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Notebook 38: Giant Killer Gabe

After that game Vincent said he’s good at those shots because he’s been “small all my life”, and thus has had to find ways to survive among the redwood trees.

“You have to have a little bit of a feel and touch for those shots,” Spoelstra says. “He works on them all the time, but there’s a lot of guys who work on them as well and they still don’t have the necessary feel and spatial awareness of where the shotblocker may be, and the timing to get off those shots. But if you watch him work after practice, and he’s constantly working on different kind of finishes off either foot, with either hand, and from different ranges inside that circle.”

-With his wild, one-legged, running game winner in Utah last night, Tyler Herro now has three shots to take the lead in the last 10 seconds of a win this season. That ties him with Dwyane Wade (2011-12) and Eddie Jones (2001-02) for most in a single season for the HEAT franchise. Wade of course has 12 of those shots in the regular season, but Herro is now tied with Tim Hardaway with five for second-most in franchise history. At the rate the HEAT are playing these clutch games, we might as well see a few more.

-Orlando Robinson continues to give Miami good minutes at backup center. Nothing spectacular, but Spoelstra has given him credit for playing hard and finding ways to be in the right place whether by rolling to the rim or fighting on the offense glass. No small part of that success is due to having guards like Kyle Lowry – who also helped guide Omer Yurtseven to success last season – around, and Lowry had this to say about his role in helping another young player along:

“My job is to make these guys get easy looks, easy shots, feel comfortable out there, and try to be able to support their family and get contracts.”

It’s a business at the end of the day, and it’s always refreshing to hear a veteran speak to the roles they play in the livelihood of young, unproven players.

-Duncan Robinson is now the franchise all-time leader in three pointers made. You probably knew that. What’s interesting going forward is how quickly the record will be broken once Robinson is said and done. Three-point rates are only increasing, even if the rate has slowed a bit, and it’s entirely possible another HEAT player could break Robinson’s final mark within a few years. Across the league, any three-point records based on volume feel like they are being made to be topped.

-Miami has played 12 games this season decided by three points or less. That's already more than they've played in any of the previous three seasons, with 2019-20 coming out with the most at 10.

-Victor Oladipo’s dunk on Walker Kessler was his first dunk of the season. In Bam Adebayo’s words after the game, “Man, he dunked on that man.”

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Coup's Notebook Vol. 38: The Need For Turnovers, Miami's Plan Three, Nikola Jokic Kicks Out, Gabe Vincent Topples Giants And Tyler Herro Joins Rare Air

The Miami HEAT are 16-17 with a Net Rating of -1.4, No. 22 in the NBA. They are No. 8 in Defensive Rating and No. 26 in Offensive Rating. Here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing, and a Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Before we get to how Tyrese Haliburton got so open for his game-winning three Friday night, let’s first look at how Tyler Herro got just as open on the play before.

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Notebook 37: Herro Springs Open

The value of good screens. T.J. McConnell probably should have been playing higher up on Herro and being more physical, but as it stood he allowed Herro to get a pretty full head of steam going before Max Strus was able to clip him with a screen. Given that a three was the only thing that could have hurt Indiana here, you could also argue that Buddy Hield, seeing that McConnell was already trailing the play, should have called and audible and switched out onto Herro and trusted that McConnell would read it and switch onto Strus. Myles Turner saw what was happening and tried to get out to the arc, but at that point Bam Adebayo was laying down a pretty good block for an offensive lineman. Herro doesn’t need much more time than that.

Miami scored with good technique and good execution while Indiana may have been a bit too rigid sticking to their assignments. As for the next play...

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Notebook 37: Haliburton Game Winner

Most teams are going to switch in this situation to keep the action flat, and after the game Herro indeed said this was initially a clean switch. From the sound and look of it, it was Haliburton’s little hesitation with 5.5 on the clock where Herro thought Lowry was going to recover and switch back. All it took was half a second where one guy thought his teammate was doing one thing, and the other guy thought his teammate was doing the other, and Haliburton had the shot.

“Me and T just didn’t communicate well enough,” Lowry said. “I went to help, he thought I was going back, we left a guy with nine threes open. Our mistake. I’ll take the blame on that one. I tried to help, but I should have just stayed on him.”

“Just a miscommunication,” Spoelstra said. “Haliburton came off it, then he crossed back and it was a little bit of confusion on who was taking him on that.”

Beyond that shot being a game winner, what was interesting about it is that it was the same way Haliburton got to a chunk of his career-high 10 threes for the evening. Not necessarily miscommunications, but that little pocket of space and time which occurs right in the middle of any switch exchange. If you remember, this is the same type of shot Trae Young was trying to hunt against the HEAT last year when he had trouble avoiding Adebayo’s switches, and after ending up facing down Adebayo against the shot clock so often in his 0-of-9 game a couple weeks ago, Haliburton clearly had a plan of attack for where he could find space.

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Notebook 37: Haliburton Pocket 3's

“There’s these moments in between the pick-and-roll where I thought he was really good, Spoelstra said. “That was kind of an example of that on the last play, the gap in between the switch where he was just exceptional tonight.”

Asked after the game about those plays, both Adebayo and Lowry – “Get up,” he said – noted that the best way to take that shot away from a great shooter is to play up high on them and force the offensive big man to set a real screen in close quarters. Of course you might give up some driving lanes, but against the few players in the league who can consistently take that shot with confidence, sometimes it takes extreme measures. Miami had to resort to some pretty hard traps and doubles down the stretch just to eliminate the possibility of Haliburton doing anything with the ball on his way to a career-high 43 points.

After Haywood Highsmith had the best game of his young career on Tuesday night, scoring 18 points in 40 minutes on 7-of-10 shooting, it’s worth taking another quick look at how he’s been performing for the HEAT considering he’s already more than doubled his career high in minutes in his third season.

The offense we don’t need to spend too much time on. He’s struggled a bit finishing around the paint, mostly off the catch but with the occasional fake handoff thrown in, but you can clearly see where the team is trying to get him comfortable with those same jump-stop floaters that P.J. Tucker was so effective with last season. After a very slow start from the arc, his three-point percentage is up to 37 percent, 35 percent from the corners. As you would expect from an Erik Spoelstra team, everyone has been pushing for him to shoot more and shoot with confidence when he’s open.

“Everybody has been,” Highsmith says. “They got confidence in me. I have to have confidence in myself.”

“I’ve always had confidence in H, from the beginning of the season,” Herro said.As long as Highsmith isn’t hesitating when he’s open, and he’s converting at an above-average clip, he’ll be fine on that end. When Jimmy Butler was out against Chicago recently and Spoelstra played multiple shooters, it was often Highsmith at the end of the passing chain with the best opportunity.

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Notebook 37: Highsmith Shooting Chain

Make or miss, that’s a shot he has to take.

In that same game, Highsmith made his presence felt defensively. Nobody really stops DeMar DeRozan, and DeRozan hit some tough jumpers over Highsmith same as he did to anyone else, but Highsmith got him a couple times, too. A tipped dribble here, a good contest there. Nothing fancy, but effective.

“He had some tough buckets on me, I had some tough stops on him,” Highsmith said. “I held my own. He’s definitely one of the best players I ever guarded in my career.

“It made me feel like I’m a good defender, that I’m doing a good job on him.”

The numbers say Highsmith is giving up an inordinate number of points in isolation, over 1.2 points-per, but once you take assist opportunities out of the equation that number – on-ball defenders are still partially responsible for those since passes often come if they get beat and help has to come, but they also have less control if a three falls or not – drops to 0.95 over just 22 possessions. And the video looks pretty good.

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Notebook 37: Highsmith Isolation Defense

Sometimes he’ll give up a drive, but he’s becoming more aggressive with his defending, actively trying to poke the ball away or swipe down on bigger players. Being more of a defensive playmaker, if you will. Miami is 1.6 points per 100 better with him on the floor, defensively, third best on the team behind Bam Adebayo and Caleb Martin, and per 36 minutes he’s averaging about the same number of deflections as Butler.

We’ve said this many times before, but Highsmith is the closest thing on Miami’s roster to Tucker as far as multi-positional flexibility. In his first few stints, he appeared to be playing with some hesitance, unsure of his place on the team. Then he had that great burst to finish the game at Washington in mid-November, and since then he’s a 40 percent three-point shooter with plus defense. Teams are going to make him prove it again and again, and being like Tucker in form does not make you like Tucker in function, but there’s no doubt Highsmith is offering Spoelstra a semblance of two-way production when called upon. Even if he isn’t in the rotation every night – though he has been even when the team has been mostly healthy – it wouldn’t be that surprising to see him earn postseason minutes down the line. There’s a reason Spoelstra played him 27 minutes in the win at Boston a few weeks back, and why it was Highsmith closing the game when Jimmy Butler couldn’t return at the end against Indiana on Friday – a game Miami absolutely wouldn’t have been able to tie were it not for Highsmith impact plays (another fake handoff, a baseline drive-and-dish).

-One of the more subtle areas related to three-point shooting where the HEAT haven’t quite been able to replicate last season’s process is their baseline hammer screens. Last year P.J. Tucker led the league with 38 off-ball screens along the baseline that led directly to a shot, per Second Spectrum. The next person on the list had 27. This year the HEAT’s leader is, and this is pretty perfect given the role he’s trying to fill, Highsmith with seven. Those hammer screens are coming at about half the rate, and even though they don’t account for a huge chunk of attempts those are still some pretty open corner threes absent from the shot profile.

-On a related note, Miami is taking about 9.5 corner threes per 100 possessions this season, No. 10 in the league. Last year they were No. 2 at 11.8. Another small reason behind the team-wide shooting dip, with those extra attempts now coming above the break where percentages are typically lower.

-Miami was nearly as healthy as they’ve been all year heading into the Indiana game. Butler then sprained his right ankle, and we’ll see how long that keeps him out, but what was interesting about the evening is that Spoelstra didn’t even know who was available until about 90 minutes before the game. ““I can’t do role definition right now, 90 minutes before the game,” Spoelstra said he told the team. That’s how you end up with a situation where Gabe Vincent is available but doesn’t figure into the rotation. It’s nice to think that coaches always know going into a game who they’ll have, but these days things are fluid and you have to adapt on the fly.

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Coup's Notebook Vol. 37: Herro Gets Open, Haliburton Hits The Pocket And Highsmith Makes His Mark

The Miami HEAT are 12-14, No. 10 in the Eastern Conference with a Net Rating of -1.9, No. 25 in the NBA. They finish up this brief home-stand against the Spurs Saturday night before embarking on another four-game trip, including an excursion to Mexico City. Here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.

The HEAT have a funny relationship when it comes to switching defenses. Because they rely so much of free-flowing actions and movement to get to their most valuable shot opportunities at the rim and beyond the arc – even with the isolation game of Adebayo developing at a rapid rate, those possessions are most likely to end up with mid-range two pointers – any team that can functionally switch one through four or five can flatten Miami out and stall their offense into what are typically the most inefficient zones on the floor.

That’s pretty much exactly what happened against the Clippers. Miami only took 50 percent of their shots at the rim or from three – well below league average, and you can compare to 63 percent for the Clippers – and took a season high 32 non-rim paint shots. Fortunately for them they made 17 of those attempts, which was enough to carry the day, but it’s not the shot profile they’re going to deliberately seek out night-to-night.But the other side of switching is that there is sometimes a part of the game when you’re just fine with being flattened out. Say, for example, you have a five-point lead in the final five minutes of yet another clutch game – exactly the time and score where expected shot value takes a bit of a backseat to the game management aspects of completing a win. At that stage field-goal percentage can be more valuable than effective field-goal percentage because you just want to keep the train on the tracks, shots going up without turnovers and the clock moving.

If the other team is switching, you get to do all that while finding the best possible matchup for your best player. It’s exactly what other teams have been doing to the HEAT for years, and its how Miami was able to ride Jimmy Butler to a victory over the switching Clippers.“It’s pretty much league wide,” Erik Spoelstra said. “You’re not going to be running flex with six minutes left or motion offense from the old Indiana Hoosiers. You’re going to get the ball in your best players’ hands. But you have to be purposeful in this league, there’s a lot of different schemes you can do to burn clock. You don’t want to be caught in the last five seconds with a home run play. Your purpose has to be great, everybody has to be on the same page, and your spacing is so critical out of whatever action you’re trying to get to at the end.”

With the Clippers giving up the switch to keep the ball in front, Butler was able to draw either Reggie Jackson or Luke Kennard pretty much at will down the stretch. Watch these possessions and keep an eye on the scoreboard.

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Notebook 35: Jimmy Clippers Isolations

Eight seconds. Nine seconds. Twelve seconds. Butler isn’t playing with fire, putting himself at risk for a late double team. He’s just eating enough clock, ensuring a shot goes up and not giving the ball away.

“We got the ball where it was supposed to go,” Adebayo said. “It was just a very fluid fourth. We never got worried. We kept trying to put points on the board. Fourth quarter sometimes people can get complacent and stop attacking so they can keep the lead, I feel like we did a great job of trying to take what the defense gave us and shots were going in.”

It may all sound elementary, but for a team that came into Thursday’s game No. 25 in fourth quarter Offensive Rating, just being coherent and composed with a lead in a tight game goes a long way. &nbsp;

It helps, too, when the player you’re relying on down the stretch happens to be one of the best isolation guys in the league. After producing 1.09 points-per-isolation a year ago, Butler is putting up 1.25 points-per this season at a rate equivalent of most other top scorers in the league not named Luka Doncic – with that 1.25 good for No. 2 in the league behind Kyrie Irving.

You can’t run your entire offense this way and expect to be successful, nor does every team have the matchups worth hunting. You can’t survive on a diet of contested two-point jumpers. Still, there’s a time and a place when it’s the best food at the buffet. As far as Thursday night was concerned, chalk up a victory for coherence.

After using 53 isolations over the course of four games and producing 1.16 points-per-possession with them, Bam Adebayo was bound to start drawing more attention. Sure enough, in two games against Memphis and Detroit the defense starting creeping closer and closer in the paint, not exactly sending hard double teams but offering soft, make-you-think attention before closing for a contest. In those two losses, Adebayo used 12 isolations – with minimal post-ups logged because of how often he plays face up – half the volume of the previous four games, and produced 0.66 points-per (with five turnovers against the Pistons).

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Notebook 35: Bam Memphis Turnover

It wasn’t quite as sudden a development as it seemed, largely appearing so because of two consecutive games against a Boston team that largely hasn’t sent help at Adebayo – even in the Eastern Conference Finals – as they trust Al Horford to keep the ball away from the rim as they cut off passing lanes to shooters. And Adebayo naturally wasn’t going to keep shooting 60 percent on those long paint shots forever.

It also wasn’t the first time Adebayo started seeing doubles. When he had his long scoring stretch a couple of years ago, with his career-high 41 points against Brooklyn sandwiched in the middle, he started drawing help then as well (after Brooklyn also made a clear point of defending him one-on-one in order to prioritize shooters). But then the team got healthy, Adebayo’s isolations went back down and it became something of a moot point.

All of which is to say that the more Adebayo uses isolations and scores at a productive rate with them, he’s naturally going to start seeing extra attention as the scouting report changes. And if it those changes start consistently generating simple possessions like this one against the Clippers – two on the ball, open shooter on the weak side – that could spell panacea for a Miami offense in dire need of solutions beyond threes going in.

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Notebook 35: Pistons Move Away From Bam

“Just passing out the double,” Adebayo says. “I feel like that’s the biggest thing. When they put two on the ball, I feel like that’s an easy pass out and they’re in rotations from there.”

There are many more layers to this that we’ll dive into at length down the road once we’ve seen this play out a little longer. This is a test that has multiple questions and multiple answers, and it takes time before you can get a clearer picture of how effective a player can be with increased on-ball attention and focus. For now, this is as positive an offensive development as the HEAT have had in what has been a very uneven first quarter of the season. For later, it could change the entire way Miami’s offense operates.

Speaking of important developments, the most important thing happening under the surface of everything the HEAT are trying to do this year is that teams continue to find ways to either keep Adebayo out of actions entirely or get him switched out on the perimeter and drag him as far away from the play as possible. It all started happening in earnest in the second half of last season, and with every game it becomes clearer and clearer that teams are becoming smarter about how to deal with one of the league’s premier one-on-one defenders.Most teams at least. When a young team in Detroit came to town on Tuesday, some of their younger players still had lessons to learn. Killian Hayes, for one, thought attacking Adebayo was a good idea on more than one occasions.

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Notebook 35: Killian Hayes Attacks Bam

In this case, Detroit got wise real quick. In the first three quarters of that game, Adebayo was logged as the closest defender on 12 shot attempts. In the final period, that number was two. It certainly helped that the Pistons leaned on their veterans down the stretch, by which point we started seeing what has become practically commonplace in HEAT games. Adebayo dragged out of the play, the Pistons finding the matchup they want.

“It’s all good man, it’s part of the agenda,” Adebayo says. “They’re going to try and take me out and have their rights and wrongs.”

Granted it wasn’t Adebayo’s best defensive game, either. Bogdanovic beat him off the dribble once in that fourth quarter and got to the cup. Everyone needed to be better than they were in that game. Still, it was interesting to watch a young Pistons group adjust on the fly. It’s becoming more and more rare to see someone like Killian Hayes, much less Paul George on Thursday, try and attack Adebayo on the perimeter. How the HEAT are able to adjust to this and evolve – which we’ve seen with fewer early switches in addition to all the zone – will likely define their season on the defensive end.

-Miami ran fewer than five possessions of zone defense against the Clippers for effectively just the third time this season. They still gave up 1.14 points per possession because the Clippers shot the ball so well, getting plenty of good looks along the way, but that’s still close enough to league average and it’s a positive to see them be able to close a game out against a good team without having to lean most of their weight on zone coverage.

-The HEAT are one of seven teams currently shooting better on pull-up threes (35.8) than catch-and-shoot threes (32.8). That’s problematic at the moment, but there’s a world where the catch-and-shoot numbers start to improve and the pull-up number remain relatively consistent. That’s a very good world for Miami’s offense.

-A huge part of those pull-up numbers is the fact that Tyler Herro is currently at 45.3 percent off the dribble. He was excellent on one-dribble relocation threes last season, and he’s at 57.1 percent on those shots this season, but he’s also draining nearly half of his threes off 3+ dribbles. Another welcome development.

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Coup's Notebook Vol. 35: The Coherence Of Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo Seeing Double And Detroit Gets Wise

The Miami HEAT are 9-11, No. 11 in the Eastern Conference with a Net Rating of -1.1, No. 21 in the NBA. They’re about to embark on another four-game road trip with two games against the Boston Celtics sandwiched in the middle. Here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.

Have you ever noticed how Bam Adebayo rarely takes hook shots? He certainly can and has used them, but as a downhill, pick-and-roll player Adebayo has most often gravitated toward push shots and floaters to capitalize on momentum. Even when contact turns him away from the rim, or he initializes contact out of a post-up, he’s typically not going over one shoulder for a hook, preferring to keep two hands on the ball – which has the benefit of allowing him to pump fake and draw fouls – so he can get to a short jumper.

The fact that it’s a jumper he leans on at all is unusual. Most bigger players, non-Nikola Jokic division, don’t have the touch to shoot a regular jumper from such short range. Even Adebayo didn’t quite have that touch earlier in his career – he says playing HORSE and trying circus shots has helped him there – but now he’s reached the point where he can effectively pullup from anywhere in the paint with a normal follow through much in the same way Kevin Durant can.

For a player who sometimes struggles to score against elite length and rim protection, it’s a critical skill. Push shots and floaters are shots that you shoot going into a defender and going into size isn’t always a wise decision. With a jumper, Adebayo can both get elevation on the ball with two feet underneath him while also add some fade to get it over the top of someone like Kristaps Porzingis.

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Notebook 33: Bam Go-To Shot

“He’s developing that go-to shot where you just have this feeling now when he’s getting in the paint, at the circle, he’s going right or left against length, you feel like that shot is going in every single time,” Erik Spoelstra says. “It’s not every time, but you just get a sense where players get to that level like, ‘Oh, that’s going in.’ All the great players get to that point. And that’s a great look for him. It’s right in that in-between game, it’s not a 17-foot shot, its aggressive, assertive, [with] elevation, he can get it off against bigger guys.

“I think it’s just amazing when he does that, when he really elevates. When he gets off the floor and his release point is over seven feet, I think that’s the best version of that pullup.”

So far this season, no center has attempted more non-rim paint shots than Adebayo, as he leads both Giannis Antetokounmpo (105 attempts) and Jokic (104) with 121. If you narrow his attempts in that zone to just jumpers, only Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (41) has taken more than Adebayo (33), with Durant coming in third. The next center on that list is Joel Embiid, with 17 attempts. In other words, Adebayo is displaying the touch to take short jumpers like a guard, or one of the best and most unique shooters of all time in Durant, despite being a 6-foot-9 center.

Efficiency still matters. League average on non-rim paint shots is about 45 percent. Adebayo is currently at 43. That should improve considering he finished at 49 percent in that region last season – Jokic, typically the best from that range, was over 60 percent – despite the thumb injury, as should his 39 percent on short-range jumpers after being closer to 44 a year ago. The Shot Quality data has remained right around the same level. Adebayo’s tough shots haven’t gotten tougher, he’s just taking a few more of them.

That’s probably the best part. The volume. Adebayo won’t reach Jokic levels on short shots just as most wings not named Durant or Kawhi Leonard don’t reach Michael Jordan’s efficiency from the mid-range. Having a shot you know you can get to comfortably in any situation, even against length, is hugely valuable in a playoff series. Miami still needs Adebayo to roll to the rim, and they still need Jimmy Butler, Tyler Herro and Kyle Lowry to playmake, but part of becoming a go-to- scorer is having a go-to shot and Adebayo is been growing into his for years.

Before he missed the last two games with a shoulder injury, something interesting was happening with Max Strus. Yes, his three-point percentage had dropped to 35.3 after topping out at 41 percent last season, but it’s still early enough and Strus was closer to 38 percent before the most recent road trip where so many players missed games and Strus had to take even tougher shots than usual.

Forget about the percentages for a moment. What’s interesting about Strus is that, per 100 possessions, his three-point frequency had dropped a little (12.3 per 100 down from 13.9) while his two-point rate was skyrocketing, up to 6.3 per 100 from 3.8. Last season 78 percent of Strus’ shots came from beyond the arc. This season that number has fallen to 65.9.

Some of this is purposeful. Strus hasn’t been shy in talking about how he’s more than just a shooter – Spoelstra echoes the same sentiment – and previously spoke about how he’s worked in the offseason to expand his off-the-bounce game. And yet some of that intention comes from how he’s being defended. If you know teams are going to start chasing you off the line, it’s only natural to work on the skills you’ll need to counter that coverage.

Against Cleveland earlier this week, Strus only took five threes. Spoelstra noted afterwards that it mostly had to do with the Cavaliers defensive focus.

“They were playing on the top side of all of our shooters,” Spoelstra said. “It requires extra efforts, extra focus to get to the second layer of your offense. I thought at times we did, but for the most part they took us out of our actions with the physicality and keeping our shooters from getting to the three-point line.”

What does that top-siding look like? It’s essentially Strus’ defender fighting over the top of screens to get a rear-view contest should Strus attempt to capitalize on the brief window of opportunity.

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Notebook 33: Strus Top Siding

Nothing too complicated, but what Cleveland also did is something Utah popularized against Duncan Robinson a few years back, which was bringing a third defender over from further along the arc to add another layer of constriction to the shooter’s space.

And then, of course, there are possessions where Strus is simply being face-guarded or pressured.

Miami has seen all of this before. Strus has been in some ways at a disadvantage because, in coming into the rotation after Robinson – whose two-point rate has also doubled this season – he was facing defenses that already had a couple of seasons worth of experience against Robinson. Strus has always been facing coverages designed for someone else. The benefit, of course, is that he’s been able to adjust. He’s shooting 57 percent from two and has shown some nice touch on floaters. Strus and Robinson shooting more twos because they’re being pressured at the arc is not inherently an issue if the efficiency is still there – both will likely see their percentages rise over time – but it does change the geography of the floor somewhat if the ball is staying in their hands rather than their gravity creating attack space for Miami’s lead playmakers.

The HEAT have scored reasonably well over the past two games without Strus, but it took the best first half of Kyle Lowry’s career and one of the best offensive games Adebayo has ever had in order to get there. The offense (No. 24 at 109.6 points per 100) will need Strus to get back closer to league average or better, the requirements of that need might just be a little different than they’ve ever been before.

Miami currently leads the league in clutch games, meaning contests that are within five points in the final five minutes, with 15. If they continue at this pace, with 75 percent of their games tightly contested down the stretch, they have a chance to be the first team to finish over the 60-game mark in the past decade.

Is that a good thing? It’s a little bit of yes, a little bit of no. Being in a ton of close games means you always have a chance to win. The glass half empty viewpoint is you also tend to have a chance to lose. There’s only so much control teams have over the outcomes of games that come down to a few possessions going one way or another, and no matter how exciting the finishes are it’s always better to take chance out of the equation by earning a bigger lead before those final five.

Predictably, the results for teams leading the league in clutch games are a mixed bag. Of the past 10 teams who have led in that category, four of them have missed the playoffs outright. Another four lost in the first round – including the 2017-18 HEAT – and the remaining two, the 2016-17 Wizards and 2019-20 Nuggets, lost in seven games in the second round. Go back even further and you’ll see more of the same, teams that are well outside the postseason picture and teams that had chance at taking a first-round series.

The one exception? The 1999 Pacers team that made it all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals before falling to the Knicks. That was a 50-game lockout season, so it’s an exception in more ways than one.

Does any of this matter right now, while the HEAT are dealing with so many injuries? Not really. You take wins however you can get them. But as they get closer to whole they’ll probably want to finish off some of these games before getting into the clutch. As fun as close games are, point differentials and Net Rating have generally been better indicators of long-term prospects.

We don’t need to belabor the point about the HEAT’s zone usage. With this recent run of shorthanded games where they’ve leaned on the coverage even more they’re not only blowing previous zone records out of the water, they’re redefining how zone can be employed in an NBA game. There are likely to be diminishing returns over time – over the past five seasons Miami’s zone has allowed 0.97 ppp before New Year’s Eve and 1.11 ppp after, an effect which is consistent each year – as teams prep for it, but for now it’s a fixture in the team’s night-to-night oeuvre.

Washington never really figured out the zone in these three recent games. They knew where to put players and where to probe, but their approach was never as consistent as Cleveland’s, for example, early last week where the Cavaliers were screening the zone for Donovan Mitchell or Darius Garland on one side and then flipping it to the other ballhandler as he dashed through the weak-side gap at full speed. That said, the Wizards did have an interesting wrinkle that is worth paying attention to.

Most teams will flash their big men to the heart of the zone. They’re big targets and they can keep the ball high when the flanks of the zone collapse to the ball. The teams with highly skills bigs who can operate in traffic at the free-throw line can be an absolute nightmare for the coverage. Kristaps Porzingis made some shots in that area for the Wizards, but he was a far cry from being a true zone buster. So, in certain spots, Wes Unseld Jr. went to a different look.

Notice who is flashing to the middle on these possessions?

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Notebook 33: Beal Middle Zone

Part of what makes the zone so effective is that it removes some agency from the oppositions high-level scorers. With their usual attack zones stripped way, it’s common to see high-usage players suddenly stuck just swinging the ball around the perimeter. Bradley Beal is far and away Washington’s most talented offensive playmaker, so they just stuck him right in the middle of the action.

There aren’t a ton of Beal analogues around the league so this may be a moot point, but we could start seeing more of this, more of guards and wings working in the middle of the zone, as teams come to expect the coverage from the HEAT.

-At just over 33 percent, Miami clearly isn’t shooting as well from three as last year when they led the league. That much is clear. But their offense has also dipped because their two-point shooting, No. 24 at 52.3 percent, has slipped about a percentage point. We’ll see where that ends up once the team gets healthier, but it’s notable given that there’s been an increase in unassisted shots being taken.

-Miami is currently sitting No. 14 in Defensive Rebounding Percentage, but here’s something a little deeper. On opponent shots taken at the rim – where you might think size plays a larger role – the HEAT are No. 11 in defensive rebounding. But on corner threes, shots with a wider range of outcomes as far as where the ball will land, they are No. 25. They’re also allowing the second-most corner threes in the league after allowing the sixth-most last season.

-Always a pretty slow team, Miami’s defensive pace – the average length of their defensive possessions – has slipped about half a second from last season when they had the “slowest” defense in the league at around 15 seconds. Not a huge shift, but a small way of showing how teams are getting more early offense against the HEAT’s defense, which is slowly climbing up the leaderboard now sitting at No. 12 (albeit with splits that still dramatically favor their zone coverage).

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Coup’s Notebook Vol. 33: Bam’s Go-To Move, Top Siding Strus, A Whole Lotta Clutch and Bradley Beal’s Interesting Zone Wrinkle

The Miami HEAT are 4-6 with a Net Rating a -1.8 after two close wins over the Warriors and Kings and a similarly close loss to the Pacers, which puts them at 3-3 in clutch games this season. With a four-game homestand on the docket, here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.

Part of the reason Tyler Herro as a starter always seemed like it would work, on paper, is that Herro was one of the best catch-and-shoot players in the league last year. He was so good off the catch, actually, that it obscured his relative percentage inconsistencies with the ball in his hands despite the volume scoring that came with leading directly to him winning Sixth Man of the Year.This year, the profile has flipped. Somewhat. Herro has been middle of the pack shooting off one or no dribbles – we include one for the relocation dribbles that often happen off the catch – but among the 62 players who have taken at least 50 shots off two or more dribbles he sits No. 19. His effective field goal percentage on those shots is up to 53.1 from last season’s 45.1. The Shot Quality is up, too.Now, there is a distinction to draw here between touch time and actual isolation play. Herro has been dynamite in the pick-and-roll producing 1.15 points-per-screen as a ballhandler – a little better than that with Adebayo, which Adebayo says Spoelstra has reminded them of more than once – yet the added efficiency off the dribble has so far not translated to isolation efficiency. Last year Herro produced 0.84 points-per-isolation (including direct assist opportunities), and this year that number is down to 0.77 albeit on only 36 possessions. Certain matchups, particularly against big wing defenders, can be troublesome. But in these last two games without Jimmy Butler, Erik Spoelstra has trusted Herro with classic late-game isolations – in fact the shots Herro took against the Kings and Pacers were the first two multi-dribble, half-court shots of his career in the last ten seconds of a one-possession game (outside of a game in the bubble when most of the starters were resting pre-postseason). Those chances don’t come along very often. Butler only has 12 of them in four years himself. It remains notable that Herro had the ball in those spots if only because it makes you wonder if Spoelstra has taken Herro’s off-the-bounce efficiency into account.Herro doesn’t have to be a great isolation scorer. There aren’t very many of those in the league that can do it at a postseason level, and fortunately the HEAT have one of them in Butler (1.07 points-per-isolation over the last three years). But if Herro is going to be a starting-level, high-usage scorer, someone whose usage spikes into the 30’s with Butler off the floor just as it did last season, then those multi-dribble shots are hugely important. If the gains he’s showing are for real – and there’s zero concern of him losing anything off the catch – it’s a major long-term development regardless of what the team’s record is today.

Every year for the past five years, the HEAT win games because the other team just can’t figure out their zone defense. It is as much a part of the team’s defensive vocabulary as any pick-and-roll coverage at this point. Despite the reputation zone may generally have across the sport, Erik Spoelstra has often used the look from a position of strength – weaponizing his cadre of long, rangy, versatile defenders to slash the tires of any offense that thinks it may be in for just another game.It certainly worked against the Warriors the other night. Miami played a whopping 36 possessions in zone in that one, allowing just 0.72 points per possession, including 18 during Golden State’s 15-point fourth quarter. Not only were the Warriors, forced into some contested threes, missing shots, but the secret effect of the zone was fully at play.

The Warriors generally have the quickest offense in the league. Their average offensive possession takes only 13.7 seconds, shortest of any team. Against Miami’s zone, with plenty of Caleb Martin and Gabe Vincent – both as solid as ever – retreat-pressing full-court as they dropped back into their hybrid two-three, their possessions took 17 seconds – which would at the moment be by far the slowest attack.

Why is that important? Time is efficiency. The average NBA team scores 1.05 points per possession in the final six seconds of the shot clock. In the middle twelve, excluding the first six to eliminate fast breaks, they average 1.14 points per possession. That’s the difference between a Top 5 half-court offense and a Bottom 5 unit. Every second you steal from your opponent has real, tangible value.

“It just allows us to change the speed of the game,” Max Strus said of the zone, “especially with a team like [the Warriors] their offense is so fast it’s all ball movement and playing off us messing up switches or messing up defensive coverages. With [zone] it slows down their offense and makes them pass it around and shoot a lot of threes.”

Strus also mentions the flip side of this, which is that the Warriors *were* capitalizing on the HEAT messing up some defensive coverages. Against Miami’s man defense Golden State scored 1.20 points per possession, and that chasm has played out across the first nine games. In zone, the HEAT allow 0.73 points per possession. In man – and keep in mind these are half-court numbers – they’re allowing 1.03 points per with more than quadruple the total usage. That number, 1.03, is up from 0.95 last year and ranks No. 28 in the league as of Saturday morning. Miami’s overall half-court defense, per cleaningtheglass.com, sits at No. 18 after finishing No. 5 last season.It’s still very early for all these numbers. The good news is that the zone, despite being used for years and teams knowing Spoelstra is going to get to it, is still plenty effective at draining clock, distorting offenses and reducing efficiency. But that coverage is always used best as a change of pace. The night after the Warriors game the Kings had no trouble with the zone because Domantas Sabonis was comfortable operating in the middle of it at the nail – just as Nikola Jokic has done in the past as did, in the Finals a few years back, Anthony Davis. The HEAT’s foundation is strong man-to-man defense and you can expect to hear about that as long as the numbers aren’t where they are expected to be.

Miami’s relationship with transition defense is interesting. Last year no team in the league allowed more transition opportunities in live rebound situations than the HEAT – 30.9 percent of opponent defensive rebounds turned into transitions – but that is the price you pay for having the second-highest crash rate in the league behind the Toronto Raptors.

This year they’re crashing the glass far less, No. 23 in the league, but still allowing all those transitions. Nearly 40 percent of opponent rebounds are resulting in breaks, per cleaningtheglass.com, which is by far the highest mark. Some of that is early season noise, and transitions are up across the league by a few possessions a game.

The good news is they’ve been pretty solid defending in those spots overall, allowing an Offensive Rating of 118.1 on the break, which ranks sixth. It’s still a lot of possessions that you’re never going to defend like you do in the halfcourt, but the way the team cleaned up their transition defense last weekend – down the line, starting with Spoelstra, everyone was talking about rebounding and break defense – headed into their win against Golden State was interesting. It wasn’t just that they weren’t getting back, it was that in trying to get back to the right guy they were getting back to the wrong guy.

“We just watched the film yesterday of our transition defense and coach made some great points about how we can get back and do things the right way, not just running to your specific matchup,” Kyle Lowry said after the Warriors game.

Notebook

Coup's Notebook Vol. 42: The Offensive Theory Of Everything, Taking Players Out, Turning Up Turnovers And Pinching The Pressure

Coup's Notebook Vol. 38: The Need For Turnovers, Miami's Plan Three, Nikola Jokic Kicks Out, Gabe Vincent Topples Giants And Tyler Herro Joins Rare Air

Coup's Notebook Vol. 37: Herro Gets Open, Haliburton Hits The Pocket And Highsmith Makes His Mark

Coup's Notebook Vol. 35: The Coherence Of Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo Seeing Double And Detroit Gets Wise

Coup’s Notebook Vol. 33: Bam’s Go-To Move, Top Siding Strus, A Whole Lotta Clutch and Bradley Beal’s Interesting Zone Wrinkle

Coup's Notebook Vol. 30: Tyler Herro's Two-Plus Combo, Zoning The Clock And A Theory On Transition Defense

Coup’s Notebook Vol. 29: Tyler Herro And Bam Adebayo Spur An Offensive Change And More From The First Week Of The Season

Coup's Notebook Vol. 25: The Truth About Udonis Haslem, Caleb Martin Is Required, Schedule Thoughts And Other Notes